Local black couple instrumental in fighting for equal rights

Monday

Feb 25, 2013 at 7:17 PM

In the late 1800s, a black couple residing in Terrebonne Parish were together active in the efforts of former slaves to cultivate and extend the social equality gained by Emancipation and the Union victory ending the Civil War.

Bill EllzeyCorrespondent

In the late 1800s, a black couple residing in Terrebonne Parish were together active in the efforts of former slaves to cultivate and extend the social equality gained by Emancipation and the Union victory ending the Civil War.The Rev. A.E.P. Albert and his wife, Octavia, lived in Houma in the vicinity of present-day Canal and Barataria streets, where he was pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal Church, and she interviewed former slaves and wrote stories of their lives before they became freemen.Both were well-educated. They had met as teachers together in Georgia before he was ordained.A.E.P. — Aristides Elphonso Peter, according to historian Paul Harvey in “Through the Storm, Through the Night,” — was active in Methodist church activities. By 1890, he had become editor of the Southwestern Christian Advocate, published in New Orleans, and circulated to Methodist subscribers, white and black alike.Octavia used her time in Houma to teach former slaves and to encourage their further education. Her interaction with the freemen also acquainted her with their lives as slaves, and she produced a series of biographical histories, which were edited and published by her husband and daughter, Laura, only after her death in 1890.A series of Photographs and Memories articles about A.E.P. and Octavia was published here in 2009, following research into an 1897 Houma Courier editorial, which supported A.E.P.'s nomination to a position as minister to Liberia.At that time (2009), few locals were aware that a black couple with such educational, literary or social activism credentials had lived in Houma some 120 years earlier.This year, however, Henry Wicker, a great-great-grandson, now living on the East Coast, discovered the 2009 articles during a Google search and started an email correspondence, which continues today.He said that the family had a well-worn copy of Octavia's book, “House of Bondage,” but most of his knowledge of his great-great-grandfather came from a 2005 book written by James B. Bennett, “Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans.”There he learned that A.E.P. had been among those who tried to slow the 1890s advance of Jim Crow racial segregation by means of Plessy v. Ferguson, which ultimately backfired with the U.S. Supreme Court sanction of “separate but equal” segregation that prevailed in the South until the mid-1900s.Plessy had been denied equal accommodations on a train traveling out of New Orleans, and sued in protest.According to Bennett's 2005 book, A.E.P. had encountered a similar experience aboard a train from Houston to New Orleans in 1891.At the time, white rail passengers could choose among several levels of service, ranging from plain “coach” to private Pullman sleeping cars, while blacks found themselves in a “colored car” no matter what ticket they held.Worse, Bennett wrote, “the colored car often doubled as the smoking car, where whites gathered to drink, curse, and engage in otherwise prohibited behavior” with no intervention by train employees.Returning in 1891 from Houston, where he had promoted the magazine he edited, Bennett wrote, A.E.P. “purchased a ticket for a first-class seat and a berth on a sleeper car” and was assigned a berth.“Another conductor then complained that Albert's presence on the sleeping car violated Texas state law.”A mob gathered, bent on “greeting” Albert on the platform. He maintained that he had been assigned the berth, that “he was just as much entitled to the comforts of the sleeping car as anybody else.“Fortunately,” Bennett wrote, one conductor “pleaded on Albert's behalf that ‘such a dignified and cultured Christian gentleman' be shown mercy, focusing on his religious rather than his racial identity.”Albert reached New Orleans safely, but the experience helped move him toward seeking legal relief in the Plessy case.

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